Rarely in sporting history has one administrator had to confront so many embarrassing scandals so relentlessly for so long.
David Gallop copped the lot, from the blue-collar sins of player misbehaviour to white-collar crimes like match-fixing and salary cap cheating.
And all the while he had to safeguard rugby league’s future in the face of stiff competition from rival codes, notably the powerhouse of the AFL, which poached league stars like Karmichael Hunt and Israel Folau as it expanded into NRL’s heartlands.
Gallop so often had to defend the code in the face of the indefensible – players urinating in public and defecating in hotels, bashing their girlfriends, street fighting, binge drinking, drink-driving, pill popping, racially abusing other players, getting charged with sexual assault, punching each other, punching coaches and even punching sponsors.
Now that his days as league’s chief executive are over, he stands as an expert in crisis management, if only because he has had so much practice.
The way he handled it set him apart from other sports bosses.
He never went to ground but remained accessible to the media and public, ever willing to face the tough questions and deliver the bad news himself.
Few could now begrudge him the chance to do “normal things without a mobile phone stuck to my ear seven days a week”.
Confronted for a couple of years with an assembly line of off-field atrocities, he dispensed with spin, talked straight, stayed calm and maintained a noble bearing.
At times he looked like a choirboy in a brothel.
In stepping down, he acknowledged league “does have a unique ability to attack itself”, adding: “That passion has to be harnessed in the right way.”
Even the lowlights like the salary cap scandals he saw as challenges – a chance to “put a stake in the ground for what the game and the game’s rules stand for”.
Gallop was no sooner into his 10-year reign than he had to confront the Canterbury Bulldogs cap rort of 2002, which led to the club being stripped of all premiership points.
But his deepest single crisis was Melbourne Storm’s salary cap cheating, perhaps the gravest scandal in Australian sport.
This was no one-off, momentary lapse in ethics.
It was a calculated, orchestrated fraud that went on for five years, amounting to a $1.7 million breach of salary cap limits.
Gallop did not flinch in dishing out the toughest punishments in Australian sport.
He stripped Melbourne of two premierships and three minor premierships.
He fined them half a million dollars and forced them to pay back $1.1 million in ill-gotten prize money.
And he made them play out the whole 2010 season while remaining pointless.
On his first visit to Melbourne after that, he was booed while presenting the 2011 minor premiership, later getting himself into hot water by comparing the passion of the fans to the fanaticism of terrorists.
It was one of the few times he allowed himself to get flustered, and he regretted it.
His worst year in terms of player behaviour was undoubtedly 2009.
The negative stories were unrelenting, they featured some of the biggest names in the game, including authority figures like coaches and chief executives, and the level of behaviour in some instances was so low as to beggar belief.
League’s 2009 shame file contained no fewer than 38 names – close to 10 per cent of the approximately 400 first-grade NRL players.
The problems began before a ball had been kicked, when Gallop suspended Manly’s Brett Stewart for being drunk at his club’s boozy season launch, and charged by police with sexually assaulting a teenage girl later the same day.
Stewart, later cleared of the charge, felt he had been wronged and didn’t speak to Gallop for two years in a row still unresolved.
Gallop was on a mission to save the game from itself.
He was making great headway, too, until the Melbourne Storm scandal and police charges laid over an exotic bet scam gone wrong in a Canterbury v North Queensland match in Townsville in 2010.
Despite league’s catalogue of disasters, Gallop managed to oversee a strong rise in the game’s popularity, highlighted by stronger crowds and TV ratings which will be rewarded in a financial windfall when the new broadcast deal expected to be worth more than $1 billion is done.
But Gallop won’t be part of what he calls the “great days ahead for the greatest game of all”.
As a lawyer, firstly for the defunct Super League and later for the NRL after its inception in 1997, Gallop was both part of the problem and the solution in the great cataclysm that once split rugby league in two.
As a staunch advocate of the independent commission set up in February and whose employ he has now left, he also had an unwitting hand in his own demise.